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Large Scale Web Apps Built on Open Source
prostoalex writes "Brad Fitzpatrick presented at OSCON with on overview of his little project. Interesting facts about the evolution of the Livejournal back-end architecture."
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Uh, like, you mean the Web itself? That's large scale, certainly was built, and is most certainly built on open source.
So, yeah, I reckon it can be done. I'm using the proof-of-concept to submit this comment.
It's a pervasive belief among the suddenly famous. IBM, MS, or Sun doesn't need this. It's the small website with a bright idea that is all of a sudden gaining popularity which goes through almost each of the stages described in this document.
This is for people with absolutely no budget and infinite traffic. This is how to live through that and come out winning like Brad apparently has.
You need to get over your favorite language/technology/term you read in the trade-rag you read last week. And then you need to get over yourself.
Give it up slashdot crowd. mod_perl is not a valid technology for a large scale website! Perl was designed for a task, and that task was NOT enterprise application development.
Spoken like someone who has never had to build a very large site (doing "real" work) completely in Perl/mod_perl. I can tell you that it most certainly can scale to enterprise needs. Did this guy do it right? I don't think so either but he most certainly learned a valuable lesson. Hopefully other people will study what he has done and improve their own systems based on his work.
For the record, Java wasn't built for enterprise application development either. As with Perl, people discovered that Java had a future there and here we are today.
A properly designed website with n-tier sepperation will be able to handle a large load and scale infinitly. You'll note that large websites who actually do real things besides logging people's daily problems don't use mod_perl and a thousand servers. There's a reason for this.
You're assuming two dangerous things... (1) That you can't have n-tier and Perl. And (2) that large mod_perl sites require lots of servers. To believe any of these things is to demonstrate your horrific misunderstanding of computer science in general. I pity the company that lets you design their architecture. Wait, no I don't.... I'll gladly take their money for fixing your mistakes.
Oh yeah, and let us not forget some other languages that are showing promise... specifically Python+Zope. In fact, I know of several people implementing n-tier applications with PHP on the front, Python in the middle and PostgreSQL in the back with much success.
And for the record, here are some large companies and sites heavily using mod_perl.
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